Tag Archives: Corporate culture

Did you know that there are more people living today than has ever died? The question is disliked by many people because they have to start their thinking engines – hard work for a lot of people. We are in what Daniel Kahneman call system 1, default mode, all day, or at least for 99,9% of the day. We rev up our thinking engines only occasionally and it is hard work. Our days pass and we hardly ever study what is going on around us.

It is estimated that there are 3 times more people that have died than is alive today and my statement above was a myth – but hopefully it got you going.

I recently attended a presentation by the CEO of SAS. He was really good but during the turnaround-story I noticed that the new SAS was all about that things in the airline industry think are important, things like connections and price. The same day I met with the CEO of a Stockholm-based company with operations in 86 countries. He confessed that he hated SAS because of the poor culture: “The most important people for SAS are the employees. They do not care if they arrive on time and the crew never goes the extra mile to make you comfortable.” I tend to agree. Why don’t they just ask the passengers what they think? Venture out of system 1 for a brief moment…

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This is a warped quote from Winston Churchill and from a speech the Prime minister made in the House of Comons. In the event, Churchill mentioned buildings and how we in the end are shaped by the quality of the buildings we occupy. The same goes for companies.

The entrepreneur shapes the company and when it reaches a certain size, the company and its culture shape its employees. The Nobel price winner Dr Daniel Kahneman compared our two mental forces, system 1 being the intuitive response, to system 2, our logical reasoning, and suggested that system 1 is 200 000 times more powerful.